Welcome to Transfigurations! This blog is intended to serve the orthodox Anglican community and the wider Christian community. We pray that all that is posted here will be faithful to the Scriptures as the inspired word of God, speak the truth in love, edify, bless and transform this local body of Christ, and be an impetus for revival, repentance, prayer and intercession!

Monday, January 05, 2015

What Christianity Contributes to China’s Economic Rise; Peter Hitchens: Mothers are better off staying at home...more

What Christianity Contributes to China’s Economic Rise ...The ongoing growth of Christianity and the growth of China’s economy may be related, according to a new study in the China Economic Review by Qunyong Wang (Institute of Statistics and Econometrics, Nankai University, Tianjin) and Xinyu Lin (Renmin University of China, Beijing).

Wang and Lin find that Christianity boosts China’s economic growth. Specifically, they find that robust growth occurs in areas of China where Christian congregations and institutions are prevalent...

Did New Jersey’s Assembly approve an assisted suicide bill without understanding it? ...The state itself could also have fiscal and other motives. By passing the bill, the government has selected a class of citizens it thinks are more in need of suicide assistance than suicide prevention. How enthusiastic will it be about paying for continued care for those holdouts who refuse this aid? Last year, over half the patients who committed assisted suicide in Oregon relied on the government for their health coverage or had no coverage at all. Over three-quarters of those dying under Washington’s assisted suicide law were partly or completely dependent on Medicare or Medicaid. Some cancer patients in Oregon have received letters from the state’s health plan saying that the government will not pay for their doctor’s recommended treatment to extend their lives, but will be happy to pay for assisted suicide...

And here is the absolute proof of that. A significant number of homes – four per cent – lose money by having both parents at work. Many – ten per cent – gain nothing from this arrangement. Yet they still do it. Many more gain so little that it is barely worth the bother.

The most amazing statistic of the past year (produced by insurance company Aviva) shows that thousands of mothers who go out to work are, in effect, working for nothing. The cost of day orphanages, travel and other work expenses cancels out everything they earn.
Many more barely make a profit on the arrangement. One in four families has a parent who brings home less than £100 a month after all the costs of work have been met...

For more than a decade, corporations have shelled out thousands of dollars in donations and consulting fees to Sharpton’s National Action Network. What they get in return is the reverend’s supposed sway in the black community or, more often, his silence...

Kim Jong Un: Slavetrader ...It gets worse. The North Korean rulers willfully starve the nation’s entire population, using the foreign exchange they get by selling their subjects as forced labor and sex slaves abroad to buy weaponry, palaces, and a fantastic assortment of luxuries for themselves. Rations are so low that the growth of children is stunted, resulting in an average height of North Korean ten year olds being some 8 inches less than their opposite numbers in South Korea. Over the past twenty years, more than 5 percent of the general population has starved to death. Conditions are so bad that men pay government officials heavy bribes in order to be chosen to be sent to slave labor camps in Siberia. In Stalinist Russia, people feared such a fate. In North Korea today, they beg for it...

Archaeologists find possible site of Jesus’s trial in Jerusalem ...For Shimon Gibson, an archaeology professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, there is little doubt that the trial occurred somewhere within Herod’s palace compound. In the Gospel of John, the trial is described as taking place near a gate and on a bumpy stone pavement — details that fit with previous archaeological findings near the prison, he said.

“There is, of course, no inscription stating it happened here, but everything — archaeological, historical and gospel accounts — all falls into place and makes sense,” Gibson said.

The Rev. David Pileggi, minister of Christ Church, an Anglican congregation whose complex includes a guesthouse and heritage center near the museum, said the discovery inside the prison confirmed “what everyone expected all along, that the trial took place near the Tower of David.”...